The Forest Lover (32 page)

She could offer him no words of comfort. She didn't even know if she could touch him.

Quietly they walked up a rise and came upon a huge cedar Raven with wings folded to his sides, beak raised, sitting on a thick, low stump overlooking a meadow. It was not a pole, but a full-bodied sculpture, the bird, head-to-tail, longer than the height of the stump he sat on. Moss had grown on his head, his back, the tops of his wings, and the hollows of his eyes.

“There was a house here called Where Raven Makes Strong Talk. Our people died here. Piles of them. Anyone who went in did not come out.” He told her how Raven on one corner of the house had a mate on the opposite corner, with the dead piled up between. “Now she's all broke, and he's alone.”

“How did smallpox get on the island?”

“On all of Haida Gwaii. Our people got it in Victoria, brought it home with them in trading canoes, dying on the way. In twenty years, only one in ten Haida lived.”

She tried to pin down exactly what that meant to families, children, sisters. Her thoughts scattered like fitful moths.

“Raven still makes strong talk. See how his beak points upward? This is the hero totem I will paint.”

The gap between her sympathy and her skill felt as wide as a sea. It seemed that the native carver saw the inner essence of his subject first, in this case that solemn strength, the spiritual aspect of Raven, and, chip by chip, the carver revealed the shape that embodied his thought. She'd been taught to see from the outside, but the times when she had approached a subject from its inner essence, as she had with Dzunukwa and
Totem Mother,
she was able to get closer to its true nature.

The vapor turned to mist, then drizzle. She tried to shelter her paper with her slicker. Water trickled through her paints. William erected a canopy over her using a piece of sail. It flapped in the wind and kept coming untied so he held it above her all afternoon. The rain falling on his face was without consequence to him. His arms must have ached horribly.

Water slicked off Raven's beak in sheets, soaked the moss of his eye until it could hold no more and fell like tears. She lifted the upward swoop of the beak to make it more defiant. Her brushes and paper, her hands, the back of her neck all felt damp. Even her bones ached from dampness. Paint that dampness. Get it into the work. Paint the struggle, the bite of raw wind, the iodine tang of the sea, its briny feel on her skin. Paint the queer raven noises in purple-black nights, the dark juiciness of earth, the smell of people dying, the village abandoned, unguarded except by a regal, rotting bird as alone as God, Cumshewa's relic of remembrance.

Emily heard a sharp, I-mean-business knock. It wasn't Sophie's soft knock. Who besides Jessica and her sisters knew she'd moved to this smaller studio-flat on West Broadway? She stepped over Joseph's cage, and Joseph protested with an “Awk!” She opened the door to a gray-suited, gray-mustached, gray-haired man. At least he was consistent.

“Miss Carr? I'm Dr. Charles Newcombe, from Victoria, representing the Provincial Parliament.”

“Yes.”

“You did write them about the new museum gallery and legislative library of the Provincial Parliament, didn't you?”

“Yes, I offered my paintings of native villages and totem poles as a collection,” she said at the doorway.

“As somewhat of an expert in Northwest Coast cultures, I've been sent to assess your work.”

“Come in. You'll have to ignore the mess.” She kicked Billy's blanket under a wicker chair, and moved Joseph's cage to the sink
to be out of the way. “I didn't expect anyone so soon. I'm not actually ready. I'm preparing a show for spring.”

She dragged out the canvases stacked under her worktable and leaned them against walls. She moved paint rags, palettes, jars of brushes aside on her worktable and laid out drawings. She spread watercolors on the floor. “I came home with twenty oils and sixty watercolors. There's no space to show them here.”

He looked up at the seven wet canvases hanging on wires from ceiling hooks. “I can see that.”

“There's more.” She stepped over Billy to haul out the canvas boards leaning in the bathtub, and laid them on the unmade bed.

“Why don't you come to my exhibition? It'll be the largest art exhibit Vancouver has ever had. No single artist has ever hired a hall in Vancouver and mounted a one-person show, large or small. Once I work up these studies, there'll be two hundred works, more than half of them large oils.”

“When?”

“In two months, March eighteenth, in Dominion Hall.”

She'd scrimped to the bone on heating oil, wore two sweaters indoors, went clamming with Sophie on weekends to make a chowder that would last until midweek, gave up chops and evening tea and jam, and cut her own hair in order to afford the rental fee.

“I can see enough right here to report to the committee.”

“Have the committee come.”

He squinted, tipped his gray head, stroked his mustache which drooped like hemlock branches. He seemed preoccupied with digesting his lunch.

“They certainly show the mystique of native iconography.”

“Thank you.”

“This one is faithfully drawn. Similar to one I purchased.”

“An oil? By whom?” She expected him to say Ted Richardson, the American she'd met in Sitka.

“No. A totem.”

“You
bought
a totem pole?”

“For the Field Museum in Chicago.”

She dropped into a chair, thinking of William weeping at Cumshewa, stroking the sea asparagus as if searching for a lost button.

“These might be useful to the museum staff in illustrating monographs on clan legends,” he said, “but you've used no standard of comparative size. Your Kwakiutl potlatch welcoming figure, which everyone knows is short, is depicted the same size as this much taller Haida pole.”

“But they're different paintings. They're not photographs.”

“Precisely. Your daubs are laid on with such a heavy hand you have to stand across the street before the colors blend.”

He gazed at them both until some thought snapped him out of reverie and he continued examining others.

“Too bad they're so brilliant. They're not true to the conditions of the coast villages. If you'd tone down your colors and if your inaccuracies were corrected under proper supervision, then the museum might want to hire you to do a wall panel.”

“Inaccuracies corrected! That's personal expression.” She heard Fanny.
You can't have it both ways.
“I'll starve and call it joy before I paint under the supervision of a committee, Dr. Newcombe.”

“It's a shame that you've mixed art and science. They may not like that, but I'll make a report and see what they say.”

She stood up to usher him out. “Fine.”

“However, this one and this one and that, I'll take.”

“But you just said—”

“Never mind.” He smiled. “I like them. They're for me.”

One was the Kwakiutl welcome figure. She was baffled.

“I was hoping to keep the collection intact, to be seen by all people in the province. They say something important when viewed together.”

She watched him write a check. The money would buy frames. She could rework those subjects from her sketches, and not diminish her collection.

He noticed her drum on the wall. “A fine example of Tlingit craft. You have a keen eye. How much will you take for it?”

“Not for sale.”

He glanced sideways at it as he left, as if to say he didn't believe her.

Billy licked her hand that held the bank check.

“Oh, for God's sake, Billy. Stop slobbering.”

She didn't know what to think. Her totem paintings had been
bought! Someone liked them enough to pay hard-earned money. She whooped a little and got down on all fours to tussle with Billy. But Dr. Gray Eyes had bought an actual totem too. And what kind of a report would he take back to the almighty committee? Still, the prospects sent her into a fever of joyous work.

• • •

Several weeks later, a letter arrived:

We regret that we cannot consider your work appropriate either for the legislative library or for the gallery. The liberties you took damage their use for the anthropologist. Although we recognize the efforts behind your work, we cannot put ourselves in a position to imply that your illustrations are accurate representations of the Northwest Coast native villages.

She snapped the letter in the air. “Signed by a committee that hasn't seen a single painting, hasn't felt their cumulative effect, probably hasn't ever seen a pole in its proper setting.”

It was too sobering for anger.

But they hadn't seen Dzunukwa either, Dzunukwa who could stride through bogs, make mincemeat of committees.

“We'll see what the people think, won't we, Billy?”

• • •

Choosing apples from the grocer's outdoor display, Emily heard a commotion up the street. The grocer ran out to see. Emily followed, holding tight to Billy's leash.

Police were rounding up Squamish from their waterfront village on Kitsilano Point and herding them to the dock and onto a barge. Everyone was carrying something—chests, gunny sacks, baskets, blankets tied into bulging bundles. Policemen shouted for them to keep moving. Men loaded their canoes and gas boats.

“Do you think it's an evacuation against sickness?” she asked the grocer.

“Worse.”

They hurried to the bank to get a better look. A crowd of onlookers was gathering. At the gangplank to the barge, a man was
recording names while another handed out money. Some men accepted it. Others passed, heads high, silent. It seemed a repeat of pushing out the Songhees from Victoria's Inner Harbor.

She smelled smoke and gasoline, saw white men running with torches. Billy's ears went back. In a few minutes, one house and then another went up in flames. Billy backed away and yanked her off balance. Flames leapt to houses, barns, fruit trees, their little cemetery and its sacred places. Rage seethed in her.

“Awful,” the grocer said. “This has been brewing for years. Eliminate the eyesore, the politicians kept saying. Clear out any native vestiges so those rich folks of Fairview will be spared the sight. That half-mile stretch of waterfront property's too valuable to waste on Indians.” He shook his head. “They were honest neighbors.”

The ragtag families looked pitiful crowded on the barge—children frightened and crying, women pressing their faces into their husbands' shoulders. Some old people wailed. Others were mute, expressionless, stiff as statues.

Amid the din of the fire roaring and the shouting of orders, she tugged Billy toward a policeman and asked, “Where are they taking them?”

“Get back, lady. Get the dog out of here.”

“Tell me where—”

“Mission Reserve. North Vancouver.”

Sophie's reserve.

“But there's been no treaty. Who ordered this?”

“McBride.” He waved her away with his stick.

The provincial premier. A Conservative and a colonial. She gripped Billy's collar and moved back, choking in the smoke and muttering, “Oh, what I'd give to tell him to his face to go to the devil.”

• • •

For a month she painted in a burst of energy, several canvases going at a time, and then confessed to Jessica, “I'm worried. It was wealthy Vancouver citizens who made the government round up the Squamish. How can I expect those same people to understand or even care about what I paint?”

“Then educate them. Give a talk in the exhibit hall.”

“Explain what ought to be plainly visible in the work?”

“Tell your experiences, like you told me. Dzunukwa and Tillie. Things like that.”

Emily snorted. “I have no stomach for those know-it-all speechifiers talking your hind leg off just to glorify themselves.”

“People don't know what you know, Emily. A lecture on totems and native cultures would do something. Don't you owe it to those people who helped you?”

She thought of Mac and Beatrice taking her to the potlatch, Chief Wakias, Henry Douse. She'd sent Mrs. Douse her painting. She hoped she liked it. But that wasn't enough.

She sighed. “Yes, my little Miss Conscience. I do.”

• • •

To commit herself, she wrote to her sisters.

March 2, 1913

Dear Alice and Lizzie,

I know it's not easy for you to get to Vancouver, but I've rented Dominion Hall on Pender Street for an exhibit of my Indian work, all the way back to my first trip to Hitats'uu. I think you'll see I've learned a great deal in fourteen years. Even though I detest all those vapory tabby cats who meow out their thoughts, I'm going to give a talk on March 18 at 8:00 in the evening. If you would come it might help you understand why, as you say, your sister persists in painting pagan artifacts, or why she paints at all.

Affectionately on this soggy morn, Millie